A Brief History

In 1844, a body of abolitionist Baptists — refusing fellowship with any congregation that tolerated slavery — organized themselves as the American Baptist Free Mission Society. Within five years they had raised the funds to charter a college on a wooded ridge outside the village of McGrawville, New York. Classes opened in the autumn of 1849 under the presidency of the Rev. Cyrus Pitt Grosvenor.

From the first day, the charter admitted students “irrespective of sex or complexion.” It was, so far as the historical record allows, the first college in the United States to do so as a matter of founding principle rather than gradual concession.

New York Central was not merely integrated. Its trustees deliberately sought out Black scholars to teach white students — a reversal of every assumption of the antebellum North. They invited fugitive slaves to lecture on their bondage. They opened tuition to women on equal terms with men, in classical studies, not the “female ornamental” curriculum then in vogue.

Tuition was deliberately kept low, and many students worked the college farm in exchange for board. The atmosphere was austere, earnest, and ideological — a kind of academic camp meeting where chapel sermons doubled as antislavery oratory.

The college’s faculty included a roster of Black intellectuals extraordinary for any era of American history: Charles L. Reason, professor of belles-lettres and mathematics, the first African American to hold a professorship at a predominantly white college; William G. Allen, professor of Greek and German; and George Boyer Vashon, professor of ancient languages, the first Black graduate of Oberlin College. They taught alongside white professors of like conviction.

In 1853 the college became the center of a national uproar when Professor Allen, a free Black man, became engaged to Mary King, the white daughter of a local abolitionist clergyman. A mob of some five hundred neighbors — armed with clubs, tar, and feathers — besieged the King household at Phillipsville. Allen escaped only by being smuggled out at night. The couple married in New York City and fled, ultimately, to England, where Allen wrote the searing memoir The American Prejudice Against Color.

The episode — covered in newspapers from Boston to New Orleans — made the college notorious. Donations to the Free Mission Society collapsed. (See the dedicated account.)

The Panic of 1857 finished what the scandal had begun. Mortgages fell due that the trustees could not meet. Enrollment dwindled; professors went unpaid. By 1860 the college had ceased instruction and its buildings stood empty. In 1864 the property was reorganized as the New York Central Academy, a preparatory school of more modest aims and more conventional politics.

The college, as such, had lasted barely eleven years. But the graduates and faculty it scattered would, within a generation, help build Howard University, lead Black regiments in the Union Army, sit in Reconstruction legislatures, and carve the first marble of a freed people’s art.